Arcis Golf
Fully managed disaster recovery with annual DR testing ensures cyber resiliency
Arcis Golf is the premier operator of public, resort, and private golf clubs in the United States with a current portfolio of nearly 60 properties in 13 states from coast to coast. An industry leader, providing dynamic direction and unrivaled amenities that complement diverse playing experiences, Arcis Golf focuses on reinventing the golf and country club lifestyle experience to a level of excellence that exceeds all expectations of family, friends, co-workers, and guests of all ages.
The IT department at Arcis is run by Jesse Jacobs, along with a team of six IT professionals which supports all corporate and golf course locations from the Dallas, Texas headquarters. The team manages the central data center, which supports essential employee functions ranging from email and networking to accessing key business applications for HR, accounting, and sales. Eighty percent of these applications are on-premises. Three members of the IT team oversee these operations. The department also manages a plethora of point-of-sale (POS) and credit card applications in use by each golf course. These applications handle significant company revenue generated through visitor purchases. Each course maintains a server that runs their system. Two dedicated staff focus exclusively on supporting the golf course operations.
The Challenge
Back in the early days, Jesse explains that the IT function was reactionary. With few technology tools and only two people, they were essentially using a “band-aid approach” to solving any technical problems which arose. “We simply had no time to do any forward thinking,” he said. “We had to tackle and solve glitches when they occurred, like firefighters.” The team was sitting on outdated equipment in the data center and many of the company systems were siloed. Keeping it all up and running and getting these segmented systems tied together was a challenge. “We were fortunate that we didn’t have an outage in ten years,” he commented.
Jesse secured a budget to make needed improvements and upgrades. The team replaced and rebuilt the infrastructure over a three-year period. “Our philosophy was always to keep all of our data in the office because the cost to move it all to the cloud was simply too expensive.”
The Solution
Once budget was secured for DR, the IT team explored options and they implemented a pilot with another solution. Summarizes: “it simply did not go well.” They soon scrapped that approach and other issues surfaced which put DR plans on the back burner. When they were ready to resume a DR strategy again, the team approached their channel partner, Technologent, for recommendations. Technologent introduced them to Assured Data Protection with their managed service approach to data backup and disaster recovery, powered by the Rubrik platform.
“Since we already monitor and manage so much of what goes on in our data center ourselves, adding a DR capability with more hardware and software was a bandwidth stretch we just could not make,” Jesse explained. “The Assured SaaS model with Rubrik was ideal. We got the functionality we sought without having to do it ourselves,” he added. Assured delivered ‘Rubrik as a Service’, a solution that gave Arcis all the control, accessibility, and functionality they needed – on site, but with an external backup location at the Assured hosted data center if needed for data redundancy and security.
Assured administers daily data replication processes with local recovery and immutable backups on-premises, including tertiary archive health on a 24/7/365 basis.
“If we should ever experience an outage, everything reverts to the Assured external backup location. We don’t lose anything – not the data, not the control – we only lose the headaches.”
The hosted DR capabilities include Assured physical assets, annual DR tests, and an isolated environment for application viability and performance testing. Technologent assigned a dedicated project manager, supported the solution installation, and continues to provide on-site engineering assistance while handling first-level customer support for Arcis.